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Just putting a shout out to anyone who wants to join us and play, I know its a total nightmare organising anything but please just message anyone else in the group to try and get a game. Steam really needs to implement a way of organising groups.

I'm thinking of starting to play DoTA2. I have some RTS experience but no DoTA experience whatsoever outside of watching some of Totalbiscuit's single draft videos. Are there any tutorial videos that you would recommend, or noob-friendly heroes to start with?

I've just started playing Dota2 a very, very short while ago (only played about 22 hours so far) so i'd take this whole post with a huge chunk of salt. But what i've gathered so far is that you generally can't go wrong with Tidehunter when it comes to newbie-friendly heros, same apperently goes for Sand King since both bring a decent, team-fight friendly stun that isn't too hard to land (and tidehunter isn't item-dependent as far as i can tell, so messing up last hits isn't that problematic). If you're into playing support/nuke i'd recommend Lich aswell, who's quickly becoming one of my favorite picks (Lion supposidly falls into the same newbie-friendly support/nuke category, but i haven't tried him yet - and he might be less peculiar than Lich). I'd avoid carries at first, but if you really have to: Drow Hunter is nice and minimalistic i guess.

Or just take the TB approach and stick with single draft for a while (after some bot matches i guess) and play a couple of random heros - single draft, especially in the lowest tiers of match making is actually fairly casual and, dare i say, friendly for the most part - at least that has been my experience on EU servers. (People don't seem to get anywhere near as frustrated as TB can get in his videos, which surprised me.)

And when it comes to tutorial videos - i guess you could take a look at dotacinema's youtube channel. Lots of guides, and a couple of interesting matches from a semi-professional perspective.

I am not sure what skill level you guys are aiming at... I am 80 hours in and I understand the basic concepts, however I am still a new player... not sure what the barrier to entry here is. If you guys are still organizing games I would enjoy the chance to play with some similarly skilled people and to share what I have learned so far.

There's an easy (pun not intended) answer to that question: Level 43. No actually we're a mixed bag ranging from 20 hrs of play to 400 hrs. What binds us together is that we play un-competitively just for the funs and comradship. So join us in mumble and come play with us. you will learn from the better players who for the most part are very generous in their 'coaching'.

Hahaha, the community is so kind. :) Yep that is my reason for wanting to get involved in the RPS dota community a bit. Maybe I won't have someone calling our entire team "F*****G NOOBS" every twelve seconds. :)

The mumble Dota 2 channels are generally organised by people playing together - so typically 5 in a room will be in the middle of a game. There's no reason not to jump in to any channel with people on though and ask what's up; the worst that will happen is they'll let you know they're playing already.

There is one called "Looking for group or gank" which I suppose is meant to be to find games, or you could join the root Dota 2 channel. Quite often there will be stragglers lurking around various rooms though, so just join anywhere with people and ask.

7/0/10 with Jakiro. Arcane boots, Mekanism, Scythe of Vyse. Wards were placed, ice paths were landed (well, most were...), generally I supported like a good little support.

Compared to the veterans this is hardly the most exciting performance in the world but I felt like I've made some good progress. I was playing with people that I think are a lot better than me so anything short of an utter feeding disaster was a positive result!

Such a shame that Dotabuff is not going to be able to obtain the same level of stats as before, I don't blame Valve necessarily but it's a bit of a downer that they chose to automatically privatise everyone's data unless you opt out. I liked seeing how I was progressing and looking at the items that were most successful on individual heroes.

Hopefully they get it sorted somehow.

Nice round by the way Beard. I find playing support characters and initiators much more rewarding than out and out carries.

I find the carries fun in their own way, the challenge is more about getting maximum farm whenever possible and making good decisions about where to go and what to join in on (and when to say "you're on your own guys, I've got creeps to kill..."). Hopefully the last step is just marching in and watching autoattack win you the game, but it's getting to that point that's the challenge...